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By far the most striking thing about the museum of failed products, though, has to do with the fact that it exists as a viable, profit-making business in the first place. You might have assumed that any consumer product manufacturer worthy of the name would have its own such collection, a carefully stewarded resource to help it avoid repeating errors its rivals had already made. Yet the executives arriving every week at Carol Sherry’s door are evidence to show that this rarely happens. Products developers are so focused on their next hoped-for success – and so unwilling to invest  time or energy in thinking about their industry’s past failures – that they only belatedly realise how much they need, and are willing to pay, to access Gfk’s collection. Most surprising of all is the fact that many of the designers who have found their way to the museum of failed products, over the years, have come there in order to examine – or, alternatively, have been surprised to discover – products that their own companies had created and then abandoned. These firms were apparently so averse to thinking about the unpleasant businesss of failure that they had neglected even to keep samples of their own disasters.

Excerpted from ‘The Antidote – Happiness for People who can’t stand positive thinking’ by Oliver Burkeman